as a cardiologist that get a lot of questions about nutrition and here's a really good one hi dr. Santora this is alex from orange what is paleo diet and is it healthy well the Paleo diet is also called a caveman diet it's what man ate in the Paleolithic period which means the period before there was a gray color so what did we do then we were hunters we ate game meat red lean meat and we fished so there's a lot of fish in the diet now there was no agriculture so clam products were mainly nuts and berries and fruit and occasional type of root type foods so if you're on the Paleo diet strictly speaking you need to avoid dairy products because there are no cows no domesticated animals so there's no milk there's no cheese there's no ice cream so you have to avoid that whole category of food and since there was no farming there is no grain so there's no barley no oh no wheat so you have to avoid bread cereal pasta all the things that you enjoy in your life and even the potato is not part of the diet because they were not harvested back then your drink of choice will be water there's no processed sugar there's no salt and there's no processed meats so is that a good diet well it probably is a good diet because it avoids processed foods and sugar and salt but it's not a sustainable diet it's not a diet that most people can adhere to its kind of expensive it's all fresh food and your limiting groups of food so you're going to lose weight and probably feel good for a while no study has shown that it prolongs life so a better alternative would be the Mediterranean diet that is a diet that is enjoyable it has been shown to prolong life cut down cardiovascular disease and it consists of fish it consists of some lean meats it consists of nuts olive oil whole grains low-fat dairy products that is a diet that you can enjoy for the rest of your life and live a longer healthier and better life though it's a great question the Paleo diet is probably ok probably safe probably good but probably not sustainable thanks for asking you .
Video Description:
Eating like prehistoric hunters and gatherers provides a very clean diet, but is it a sustainable nutrition plan for modern human beings? Larry Santora, M.D., explores the trendy paleo diet and how it works. Dr. Santora is medical director of the Orange County Heart Institute and host of "Health Matters with Dr. Larry Santora" television series, which airs weekly on PBS SoCaL Plus. Visit www.drsantora.com to view more segments on a range of health topics. Produced by Chapman University's Panther Productions, "Health Matters with Dr. Larry Santora" is sponsored by St. Joseph Health, Biotronik and Weaver Health Solutions. Video courtesy Super King Markets.
I oops all right sorry started a little early there hey everybody this is jeremy can paleo living so this is our weekly paleo Q&A and you know today I'm by myself in the future we're going to have some awesome guests on here I've got some great things lined up well then I want to make sure its broadcast in to youtube it does not seem to be give me just two seconds you all right now it's broadcasting great so you alright so let's get started so I'm Jeremy I'm the founder of pay legal living I've been doing this for quite a while and like I said this is our weekly QA we will be here every week in addition to the other videos that we post monday through thursday just fridays at 2pm you can join us live submit questions in advance to Jeremy at paleo magazine com or you will have a page shut up also on the website very soon so um as always you know the quick disclaimer which will have at the bottom here this is not medical advice new things that our lawyers normally tell us not licensed nutritionist so with that in mind let's get going so today I've got I've got three really good questions that have been submitted um and the first question is about paleo eating fruit and being insulin resistant this is one of my favorite questions because one of the things that I think is not explained well enough is the ways that we need to tailor paleo to particular people to particular situations and I don't think that paleo itself is is always enough for everybody for every situation in particular if you are uh you know I I have a lot of friends and a lot of people who are diabetic who have severe even if they're not diabetic have severe insulin sensitivity issues and that is that there's a very insulin resistance you know the blood sugar goes too high a lot of them already on insulin shots and if you're in that situation or even if you're just not very active at all you sit around for most of the day don't do much physical activity then uh you know starting with paleo is going to be great but you're going to need to do a little more and that more is going to be about controlling your blood sugar and while I don't think fruits are a cause of insulin sensitivity issues or lead to things like diabetes or heart disease on their own there's just no good you know studies or a research that would seem to indicate that the fact that it is that once somebody is there once somebody is insulin system once somebody has these blood sugar issues um you know it's a completely different ballgame so we're not just interested in what might have gotten somebody they were interested in what can start to you know kill that person's body and what can start to reverse those insulin sensitivity and blood sugar issues and I do think that for a lot of people particular people who are not active and have those issues cutting out fruit at least for a while can be a very good idea now the fact the matter is it may not be necessary to cut out fruit forever because as you can reverse and sun sensitivity issues and blood you can even reverse diabetes serves you know a lot of cases of that and you know I've known plenty of people who've been on insulin shots for a very long time with type 2 diabetes and have started eating a much better diet low carb paleo usually and have reversed all those issues so you can completely reverses issue so it's not the you know fruit is in this case a particular problem forever but it can be a problem for a while because if you've got those issues than fruit is also going to spike your blood sugar as is lean me something that's just very high in protein with very little fat will spike your blood sugar to some degree particularly things like whey protein probably not great for people with insulin resistance but this question specifically that I was asked was about fruit and people with insulin resistance and yeah I do think that if you've got a lot of insulin resistance then you do probably need for a while to cut out even whole fruits like berries and stump roots the caveat to this would be and I said this earlier that I think at some point down the road is probably best to start adding some of those types of carbs back in maybe it's not fruit I you know I actually think that tubers and starches tend to be a little bit more nutrient dense and a lot of people tend to handle those better than a lot of fruits just because the fruits are tend to be higher and fructose which puts a heavier load on your liver and if you've got those kind of insulin sensitivity issues then your liver is already working a little too hard because that hepatic tissue that is your liver tissue is the one of the first tissues in your body to really become insulin resistance so let you know to cap recap in brief you know this question about four insulin sensitivity is one that not everybody will face because you're very active if you don't have insulin sensitivity issues then improves probably never going to be a problem for you and if you do have those issues if we are diabetic if you are very obese very inactive and have insulin sensitivity issues then it is something that you'll need to pay attention to for a while maybe two three months and then you start trying to introduce reintroduced some fruits some starchy tubers back into your diet and see how it affects you then I'm just checking to make sure don't have any questions going on for this nothing yet so so that's question number one um question number two you guys are gonna love this this is the bacon question and you actually got this question this one wasn't submitted just for this QA this one was submitted to me about a month and a half ago by somebody saying they just read yet another study that says how bad bacon and other processed meats are and you know are we just killing ourselves eating a lot of bacon because if you've been following paleo for long you know that so many of the recipes out there and and so many of the posts even in a joking way have bacon it it's people love bacon and I love bacon too I'm not gonna lie and I don't eat it all that often but it's not because I don't like it because I think it's bad I just don't happen to cook it we happen to cook a lot of different things so big'uns not always at the top of our list but here's I want to frame this question so the question really is should we be eating as much begging us we're eating or is it a problem and like everything else in palin you watch my video earlier this week you know but when i talk about foods we shouldn't shouldn't be eating on a paleo diet the way that I craze in the way I think that we should be talking about anything even if you're vegetarian and im gonna see this conversation going on very often even fewer vegetarian you should be also thinking what are you should be thinking about the foods in this way what are the healthy foods were the unhealthy foods and that is a two-pronged approach first of all is it a nutrient-dense food in other words isn't something that if we eat often we're going to be getting a lot of nutrients from and secondly is it a highly toxic food that is if we eat it often we're going to be getting a lot of toxins from it and in general we should be eating foods that have more nutrients and less toxins and it's not to say that we can never eat foods that are low in nutrients of course you can and it doesn't even really matter as long as a good majority of your diet is providing a lot of nutrients and it's not stated we can never eat foods that are high in toxins in fact there's some people out there to think that we should eat foods that have toxins in them every once in a while just to have a hormetic stressor on our body that is to you know make our body react to something that it's not used to but in general we don't want to be eating a lot of toxins and we do want to be eating a lot of nutrients so looking at bacon in this respect you know the first thing I'll say is if you haven't watched it go back and watch Matt lavon's talk and i will post um you know I don't have that at the moment but that has been put up by the ancestral health symposium it was his talk at the ancestral health symposium in August of 2012 and i'll post that link in the comments below and at the end of this video and you know Matt really he's redoing this for an article right now he's told him because he had to stress test all of the data and found that there were some inaccuracies and that it really was holding up to stress testing and but what he did is he essentially went through the entire nutrient database for practically every food in the USDA database and he compared them and he essentially ranked groups of foods and even ranked essentially foods within food groups and said well what are the foods that have the most nutrients and you know that's a little bit trickier question than it sounds like because you know certain foods could have a huge amount of a couple nutrients and really we don't need any more than a certain amount of those nutrients so how much do you count the fact that they have you know ten times the amount of that nutrient we need for instance you know sweet potatoes have a ton of vitamin A but the vacuum enter is we don't need as much as they have or as much as we'd be we're eating that food all day long or you know a lot of proofs have a ton of vitamin C but you don't need as much as you beginning from those foods so the question is how do you measure that and he actually decided that the most unbiased way let's go back to the data and just counts I believe and maybe many kinds of the article to be different but I believe that he decided the most unbiased and fairest way was just to go back and only count nutrients up to a hundred percent of the recommended daily allowance or the RDI that the US government puts out because that he thought was a good baseline but to get back to the point he did this for pretty much every food and should try to establish how to look at these foods in terms of nutrients and as you can imagine if you've been with paleo for a while you know the foods that came out highest where foods that you know everybody knows pretty high nutrients like organ meats liver is incredibly high an organ meats seafood oysters shellfish incredibly high in nutrients and a variety of nutrients not just one or two and that's the same for organ meats you know coming out lower were things like grains and particularly processed foods anything you know obviously cookies cakes don't even think to the head of sugar don't have much nutrient value at all because most of the calories and energy in that is just what people normally call empty calories and that is calories that it comes from sugar or other things that don't have a whole lot of nutrients in it so when we look at the bacon issue the first way you want to look at it is in the in the respect of how many nutrients does have that's why you should go back and look at mass talk because he actually points out that when we're looking at me and specifically when you're looking at pork it's ironic or at least surprising to a lot of people but the piece of meat that comes out highest for pork is bacon and it's partially because bacon so much higher in fat than most other cuts of pork and so many of the nutrients that are found a lot of meat are actually found in the bats so bacon much more so than in pork chops or or any kind of ally important you be eating has a lot more nutrients it's more nutrient dense / amount that you're eating and that it's per weight in per calorie so in terms of nutrients and if you start comparing you know meats in general to other foods they're not as nutrient dense as sea food they're not as nutrient dense as organ meats but apart from those two things they're more nutrients than almost anything you know maybe you can throw a number of vegetables up there particularly some green leafy vegetables and even some some nuts and seeds there are some that are very nutrient-dense because they have a wide range of minerals but you know other than that they're very few things other than organ meats and and shellfish and seafood that actually outrank meats and so the fact that Bacon's at the top of that category makes it actually very nutrient inch can get a lot of vitamins and minerals from bacon so that's issue number one so it's actually it you know it scores very well on that issue so the only way we wouldn't want to be eating it is if it's very high in toxins and that's actually the reason that most people in most studies tend to think the bacon is not good to eat and so the question is well what are those toxins are they actually a problem well historically the toxins in bacon were saturated fat and cholesterol but you know I'm not going to spend any time on that today because it's a completely separate topic completely separate video let's just say there's there's no research no evidence and no support and no causal mechanism that would ever make saturated fat and cholesterol bad for us outside of a few very rare circumstances people with you know familial hypercholesterolemia you know people who have severe problems with cholesterol that's not caused by diet um and so but you know that's a very very small percentage of population and in general there's just nothing to worry about and those are the classic toxins the most reason that people don't eat bacon now apart from most classic toxins which I don't think are something that anybody should be worrying about there are newer theories as to why baking might be bad first it seems like they need to keep popping up with new series and one of the new theories is nitrates and nitrites because everybody sees things being added to the bacon in fact even within among paleo practitioners and paleo folks that I know they're always scared about buying bacon with added nitrous and you know the second link i'm going to put below this video and at the end of this video is the one from chris crecer and the fact that matter is there's never been any reason to worry about nitrates and nitrites ninety percent of the nitrates and nitrites that we get are actually from our own saliva so they're produced endogenously and which means they come from inside of us then not from an exogenous sorcerer to be from outside of our body and the back of those are produced endogenously means we can't avoid them of course so if you're adding just a little bit of nitrates and nitrites on top of that from bacon it's not going to be a problem and in addition there's just no evidence that those nitrates and nitrites do anything bad none of the studies have ever played out know the stories you've ever been replicated to show any sort of causal mechanism that would lead to any downside like cancer from nitrates and nitrites and it makes sense that those studies wouldn't play out because if that were the case aren't slide we would be causing us things like cancer the other downsides that are particularly tribute to nitrates and nitrites so also not a concern now here's what is so you know let me stop there for a second because we've talked about the nutrients to talk about the traditional toxins and the toxins that more people are worried about now and so in terms of those two things the fact the matter is Bacon's very high nutrients very low in toxins is a bad for us know I you know a yeah I'd almost like to say it is because i'd like to see fewer bacon pictures and fewer bacon jokes on paleo in your sights and and on facebook because i sometimes get a little tired of seeing all bacon all the time because you know there's so many other great foods out there and i think a lot of people whose side of that but at the same time there's just no way to say that Bacon's that bad for us in this respect now here's what i will say you should be careful about some of the times bacon you buy because they can't have other things that are wrong with it they're not inherent to bacon that is you know bacon by itself especially in the way that it was cooking prepared 100 years ago probably almost always good but now it can often have a lot of added sugar to it and if i were buying my bacon and when i do by my bacon that's one first things i look forward and see that has no added sugar or these very very little you know i'm not hardcore about never eating you know a gram or two of sugar but in general a lot of the bacon has a ton of sugar added to it and that's something I'll avoid and then the other thing is just the quality of the pig and you know that's also another topic altogether but if you can buy from a farm or a source where you know the big has been raised to mainly because honestly if you see some of the ways these pigs are raised and treated it's it's not just about your health it's it's about maintain some sort of you know ethical standards here because pigs are you know just like chickens and cows and everything else is raising the industrial food system treated incredibly badly in some instances go go listen to some of Joe solitons you know talks or read some of the things he's written about how they treat their pigs versus how pigs and and big slaughterhouses and big industrial farms you're treating it's just it's like it's night and day that is you know people like Joel Salatin who practice a more sustainable farming and then more ethical forming just you know the truth of pigs like pigs are supposed to be treated you know they've run free they don't put things in their nose to keep them from rooting for acorns and you know they treat them like pigs and pigs live the kind of life they're supposed to live now that said you know you're not looking for anything like a grasp in Pig because of course pigs eat everything they're just like humans that's why I mean what their whole nother story but they're really like you miss a very omnivorous but thanks also you know the better they're treating the less likely they aren't have antibiotics pumped into them unless they're actually sick the less likely they are to be treated with steroids because pigs can also be treated with steroids although it's less common than counts and so you know just in general make sure that your sourcing your bacon from either a local farmer that you know or either there's some brands out there which I think do better I'm not going to mention any on this call on this Q&A but so that's you know that's bacon for you that that's question number two you know recap high in nutrients low and toxins make sure to sign a ton of added sugar try to source it from a trusted source and you'll be good and bacon is delicious um the the last question that we have and this is a question that I left for them because have a great answer for it but I wanted to discuss it anyway and I get several people emailing me saying either I or someone in my family often my children are allergic to nuts how do I make all of these recipes without nuts and I think we get this question a lot because one of the most popular things on paleo recipes science on Facebook unrest recess in general is baked with even within a paleo sphere everybody wants to recreate cakes cookies you know but morning treats like croissants and things everybody must try to recreate these things in a healthier way and you know that's that's a good thing it's always good when we're trying to you know take the added sugar out of them take the grains particularly the gluten-containing grains out of them and make them help it right um so obviously I think this is a good thing at the same time of course we're trying to recreate something that was never healthy to begin with so you know you can have different opinions about that but in general one of the main ways to recreate a lot of these things is to replace the grain based flowers that is why our corn mill rice flour take those out and replace them with not lace flower often almond mill or even sometimes sea bass flowers like well that base always like i'ma go coconut flour or sea bass barros like chia flower flax flax mill sorry but uh you know in in general you're going to be putting a nun in in a lot of these cases and the reason for that is it's because it's hard to find what we call a binding agent that is something that holds everything together but it also has some flexibility and some plasticity to it because when you're cooking and you know a lot of people don't get into the science of cooking but it's particularly when you're baking two of the issues are you need things to hold your food together so for instance when you mix everything together to make a cake it's a bunch of different ingredients right and it's not automatic that when you cook it it's all going to stick together so you need something to stick that together now in a normal cake that's spiraled which make wheat in a lot of paleo foods you know on the flour has some binding capacity eggs also have some bonding capacity which are used in both normal recipes or traditional recipes and paleo recipes so they're different foods that have varying levels of bonding capacity but nut flours and grain flours I have a lot of bonding capacity so that's one thing that has come on the second thing that has to go on is that you need some flexibility in your food so i'm sure you've tried making some paleo foods based on paleo recipes and they've come out and they just as with bread for instance right bread is very flexible when you buy normal bread when you buy it made from wheat it you know you can bend it you can kind of stretch it without a tearing mune not too far but it has a lot of flexibility in it and that's because gluten actually it's very flexible so when you use wheat to make flour and it has all that gluten in it becomes very flexible in fact fact that it is before I we had a lot more gluten but it wasn't quite as flexible in fact if you go abroad and have bread made from non dwarf wheat then it's not quite as flexible but at a separate issue the but then when you make something from even from almond flour from other nut flours it's sometimes not nearly as flexible but it's more flexible than if you you know if you replace with some other things but grains tend to be more flexible nuts tuna have some flexibility and also some bonding capacity and then you kind of run out of options so the real question here is what do you use to replace those nuts and my short answer is you probably need to experiment based on the recipe with combinations of flowers that you're not allergic to um and here I'm gonna give you two answers the first one is we often so we often do use things like almond flour is part of the mix but if you're allergic to almonds obviously you want to use on I mean I think the first role of eating if something makes you feel bad you're allergic to it don't eat it so obviously don't use any nuts that you your family allergic to start with some coconut flour coconut I was a good base but alone it's not usually enough it actually has too much fun and capacity often makes things stick together a little too much will retain a little too much water it changes the recipe altogether that's why I said you're gonna take some gonna need some experimenting but it would take some coconut flour I would take some chia flour which is not just ground chia seeds that's using just ground chia seeds can be a little bit of a problem because they actually retain too much water um you can use them to some degree and maybe even as part of your mix but also use some some chia fly with this Mindy fed and that is how the fat press out of it often because they want to sell the chiel separately because the high omega-3 content but I would take the the chia flower you provided from a number of places off but one at the end of this video um and take that chia flour and mix it with the coconut flour maybe makes up something else if you're okay with tapioca flour or at least a little bit if you're okay with starches then you may be a little tapioca flour because it's low in toxins other than starch and starch on a consider to be a toxin lets you have insulin sensitivity issues that was the first question but if you mix those and you're gonna have to make some in different amounts you know trying to find recipes out there you know we have some but it's really a matter of experimenting if you're making a cake it's different for making and cooking and you know but if you're making something else that you know biscuit or whatever and so you got to experiment but I often say to use coconut flowers base use you know tapioca starch you some chia flower black smell you can use all the flexible goes rancid very fast so if you're gonna do even have to buy fresh flax seeds and then grind them yourself and then use it immediately black smokers France literally within a few hours it smells so bad um so you know that's that's the first answer the second answer is it sounds funny being on a paleo Q&A but if you're only making these occasionally and you only make you know you actually using them as a treat like once a month went there once over Iyanla you use rice flour rice flour is white rice that's essentially been ground and white rice although very low nutrients is also very low in toxins it's not a particularly toxic substance so if you're okay using this with in a treat and you know having the carbs and everything in it which it's fine i think for most people then go with rice flour because rice flour actually recreate the the characteristics of gluten and wheat flour pretty well and it's easy to use and you can almost use as direct substitute for wheat flour and most recipes and like i said it sounds funny because typically i try not to eat any grains and actually we don't make many baked goods at all but you know if i were doing it especially if I we may be doing it for a special occasion if we were having people over for a party or something I might use rice flours because yeah I eating it's not going to hurt me I know that I don't react Valley device to be fair there are some people who do react very badly to rest if you wanna most people don't do it if you find that you eat something with rice flour in it and you feel really bad either even a few cases out there more than few but much fewer than a celiac disease but you can actually have I forget the name for it but it's celiac disease for proteins in rice so you're essentially you allergic to two rice into the the proteins in there so but that's my answer you know try the coconut flour the chia flower flags know if you want to brand it yourself maybe tapioca if you're okay with the starch but if not you know maybe use the rice bar if you're only doing it like you know three four five times a year and that's it so so there are questions for today next week hopefully we'll have a ton more interesting questions and I get some more dialogue going and I may or may not have someone on next week I I've got a few things lined up but it may not happen next week so the same same bat-time same bat-channel and we're going to also put this on the website for those of you who visit paleo magazine com so thank you everybody and if you have questions or any follow-up feedback or comments you can leave them on our YouTube channel that is paleo living magazine you can just google search for that on youtube or you can leave them on our website where this video will also be posted thanks you .
Video Description:
Our Weekly Paleo Q&A. Tune in Live via Google+ or on our website! This week: Insulin Sensitivty, Nut Allergies, and Bacon! http://paleomagazine.com/blog
Links mentioned in this video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwbY12qZcF4 http://chriskresser.com/the-nitrate-and-nitrite-myth-another-reason-not-to-fear-bacon
For future weekly Paleo Q&As, please submit questions in advance to jeremy@paleomagazine.com with the subject "Video Q&A"
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